Tag: alastair

Last year for New Year’s Eve Alastair and I set up an impromptu photoshoot in his livingroom on Dec 30th with the scarlet fun fur coat he’d bought years ago for our New Year’s Eve together in L.A. years ago at the Mutaytor Ball. We then stayed up until 5 a.m. rigging the photos together into a sweet little something that was finished and postedjust before I left for Seattle with Ray, to celebrate the coming onslaught of 2008 with Cherie, Aric, and Alex.

Here it is again, our little red something, almost exactly one year later:

Alastair and I tried to see Sweeney Todd yesterday. We failed completely, but not after we braved the inside of a shopping mall. What a spectacle! The traffic alone… Surfacing was obviously a mistake. We should have stayed hiding, like I did today, processing photographs and listening to bad-ass Russian hip-hop thick with accordion.

Outsourced jelly-beans and yesterday’s microwaved Korean noodles, Mike’s first album on, sorting receipts, papers with faded ink, squinting in the water-faded light from the windows, what does this say? Another dubious pile of shiny paper, demanding, numbers arriving in the mail too many times. Somewhere, as I’m discarding yet another envelope, FREE AIR MILES, I remember that opening someone else’s mail is still a federal crime.

I was working over at Alastair’s the last couple of days. Not at home, yet still, it’s up for argument.

His place is a gentle time-warp, like a mirror only vaguely curved. I hear whispers of old conversations in what we say now, as if once we lived downtown and everything that’s been past is only traffic on the other side of the door, or as if our time apart was only a phase in an ongoing relationship that was never broken. Then I go outside.

A false sense of summer – barefoot, wet and warm, heat without end, amen – saturates the Drive. Unbidden, the words to PASSION spring to my brain and I chant it to myself in time with my footsteps as I cross the street. Reine’s sister stops to say hello, I’ve only been out the door less than a minute.

Back inside, music on, old records I remember spinning in the old eastside studio – Kid Koala, NinjaTunes, DJ something-spelled-with-a-K. I remember dancing all night. We would stay up, bass loud, crashing into the windows, making them shudder like glass drum-kits. Talking about the parties we were going to host, talking about the next gig, the latest thing the kids were into. The phone was perpetually ringing and the paintings on the wall never sold.

Similarly beautiful to the Korean clip is the riveting UK promo for the tv show LOST set to Portishead and enchantingly directed by David LaChapelle. (LaChapelle is the man behind Rize, the recent must-see hip-hop documentary). It reminds me of Massive Attack’s video for KarmaComa…”

My cluttered white desk is a small island in the cement foyer of the Dance Centre. It tethers me to this place, this screen, this set of keys. Through the glass wall in front of me, a small map of Davie street walks past – blue jeans with cell-phones, dogs, speculative couples, their arms crossed, held, ipods wearing socks with sandals, gore-tex jackets, camouflage, gossip and hoodies against the invariable threat of rain – indifferent. The new leaves on the trees outside are an unrealistic green that goes well with the electronic music surfacing from my computer. The phone stays silent, the building almost empty, there is very little for me to do, but wait and write and read.

I went to dinner with Alastair’s family this week, or some of it. His sister has brought her husband and new-born baby over from Scotland for a week. It is both comforting and strange to finally meet them. I missed them by barely two weeks when they came to visit in California. We went to Marcello’s, then to take pictures off the roof of Alastair’s building, where my cats live. As hard as I could, I couldn’t make the sunset beautiful, so I took pictures of them instead. I had only meant to come by and check in on the cats, (I had them spayed this week), but I ended up staying until eleven:thirty at night.

Standing at the bus-stop after, I found out there had been a shooting up the street, this time at the Roma Café. Street rumour says it was Over a Girl, but had no other details, except that the bus was rerouted and not to wait. The papers, as far as I’ve found, have had nothing to say.

I wear a pin that carries a last kiss from a common name on the lid of my eye, around my neck coils a scarf that brought my fluttering wings back to life, my wallet is camouflage for how much I still love him, it lives in my witty black bag, the stain of two infidelities. I am armoured, the only one who can break my heart. Pieces and parts, twisting my hands in the sink, water running red, the lesson of a clothed walk through life. Things, how little of them are mine. Of course I want more, to have their voices rise with mine again, to create a rhythm of easy conversation, the happy patina of bitten tongues and worlds beyond words, but these are what I have; the way I wear my pocket watch on my wrist and cradled in the palm of my hand, my ear against the door of the sky, my permanently borrowed hat always the word No. There is no cavalry.

I leave the room, hear behind me, “she’s my brothers girlfriend.” remember to write. My surprise is mechanical. Shelter. I rest my head on his shoulder, let the flesh give substance to a ghost, and settle in.

What is passive? This is my kit, the way I wear a skirt, lipstick, stockings, the way I shift my hips against a close explosion or brace my feet when I swing to defend myself. Nothing to be scared of. The angles of these faces, lighting up on a street corner, attached sweetly to my memory, wear quietly. Composers, compositors, blocks of personal mythology, barely attached, like birds fluttering along a wire. I have never laughed so much in my life.

Alastair‘s sister is visiting this week, so we have been rushing around cleaning and trying to make his apartment feel like a civilized adult lives there. Saturday we went to IKEA to buy furniture, so that meals may be eaten around a table, as grown-up’s traditionally claim they do. I’ve been joking that we should paint on coffee rings for added verisimilitude. He dislikes IKEA, but it doesn’t bother me, I like the futurism inherent in the company, (the IKEA catalogue is the only book printed in more languages than the bible), but it bothers him how they homogenize apparent individuality. As if in retaliation, he’s been threatening to go to Costco, which just makes my skin crawl.

Yesterday the Boy called to (accidentally) gloat about the warm L.A. weather, “I can even see the HOLLYWOOD SIGN FROM HERE.” (Here the sky remains a sheet of gray with occasional attacks of vicious rain. One shower smashed my umbrella and left me hiding under a tree for fifteen minutes.) He told me about a mylar balloon he watched escape from someone into the clear blue sky. He thinks he might be able to see Gerry and Suzi’s place from his building. I told him how my mother wants to do a motorcycle road-trip in his direction this summer. The idea of meeting my mother makes him nervous, which I understand, but still find amusing. His voice made my day, I think, as well a pleasantly delaying a return-a-wrong-thing trip to IKEA.

None of us can think of an appropriate name for the flavour of yuppie they are, these technocratic boys, only that it’s markedly different from the Gap-Shopping Two-Point-Three-Career stereotype that over-ran Joseph Epstein’s classic definition. (Originally yuppies were defined as “a market segment whose consumers are characterized as self-reliant, financially secure individualists who do not exhibit or aspire to traditional American values.” Values having shifted, thank you baby-boomers, the last bit has fallen off in the back-lash, leaving us with a cold vision of consumer based living.)

Caught in the middle of a surge in media and technological advances, they grew up generationally bilingual, technicians yet artists, geeky yet culturally aware, raised on computers and television but almost entirely lacking commercial influence. They’re like Douglas Coupland characters, but instead of remembering nuclear emergency classroom drills, it’s the Berlin Wall coming down and the birth of the internet in the mid-nineties. (Back when internet was capitalized. Remember Altavista?) They work specialized jobs within what they refer to as The Industry, be it Video Games, Television or Film, and though there’s a high burn-out rate, they continue with 100 hour work weeks, generally too busy for families or “proper” homes, because they are financially available for unusual or exciting experiences later. (Travel to foreign countries, Burning Man, etc.)

I’m sitting in the studio corner of Alastair‘s apartment, listening to a Janis Joplin and Tom Jones duet from 1970, and tidying a script intended for his summer students. (I work for free here as kitty-rent, on Saturday we made a table, tomorrow Nicole and I start painting). The cats are glad to have me home, taking turns unraveling the ribbon hem of my skirt and hunting the raindrops sliding down the window, purring as I grin at lines like, “Get me [amount]cc’s of [something that brings people back to life]”. We might be back to a terminal case of No Sky No Weather, but I have declared an Awesome zone today, so it’s not affecting me as it usually would. Both RC and Basco were in the paper today, tonight is Seder dinner with Silva, and, last night after Network and a dinner of white chocolate fondue, as I stood wrapped in a king size blanket on a balcony overlooking downtown, my heart of snow redefining the word romantic, I felt like the luckiest little arsonist that ever was.

Posts navigation

Welcome! I have been blogging since 2003. It could be argued that I've gotten better at it, but perhaps I just haven't gotten any worse. Expect a mixture of wonder, pointlessness, isolation, and community.